Qualcomm finally unveils its high-end 64-bit enabled SoCs, but they won’t be available until the first half of 2015.

Qualcomm has launched its first batch of ARM v8-based SoCs last month, but this time around it is detailing its plans for the high-end segment. The Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 will be commercially available at the start of next year and come with ARM’s Cortex A53 and Cortex A57 CPUs. Qualcomm isn’t launching any hardware this year that utilizes its in-house Krait line of tweaked CPUs this year.

Unlike Qualcomm’s earlier 64-bit offerings that were built on a 28 nm manufacturing cycle (Snapdragon 410, Snapdragon 610 and the Snapdragon 615), both the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 will be 20 nm offerings. Shifting to a 20 nm cycle should offset some of the power consumption issues, with the Cortex A57 core drawing the same amount of power as the Cortex A15 with an increase in performance by 25 to 55 percent.

The Snapdragon 810 is an eight-core SoC, with four Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE architecture. The inclusion of a global task scheduler means that a combination of all eight cores can be active at any given time. The Snapdragon 810 is one of the first SoCs on the market to feature a 64-bit wide LPDDR4-1600 interface that boasts a memory bandwidth of 25.6 GB/s. the Adreno 430 GPU is claimed to be 30 percent faster to than the Adreno 420 GPU that was seen in the Snapdragon 805. The Snapdragon 810 comes with the ability to support two 4K displays, Bluetooth 4.1, USB 3.0, NFC and Qualcomm’s IZat location technologies.

The Snapdragon 808 features two Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores, all of which can run simultaneously. The Snapdragon 808 comes with a 64-bit wide LPDDR3-933 interface with a bandwidth of 15 GB/s. The Adreno 418 GPU is not as fast as the Adreno 430, but is claimed to be 20 percent faster than the Adreno 330. The Snapdragon 808 can power a 2K screen.

Both SoCs feature a Qualcomm Gobi 9×35 series LTE modem that comes with LTE Category 6/7 connectivity. Qualcomm has been leading the field as far as LTE connectivity is concerned, and it looks like the manufacturer won’t lose ground in this segment anytime soon. LTE Category 6 connectivity features the same carrier aggregation fundamentals, but utilizes three 20 MHz (or one 20 MHz and two 10 MHz) frequencies to attain a maximum bandwidth of 300 Mbit/sec. Both offerings also feature Wi-Fi ac in addition to gesture-based and voice guided navigation.

Qualcomm has announced that the Snapdragon 810 and the Snapdragon 808 will be available in commercial hardware sometime during the first half of 2015.